Fortran Coding Form Pads...

From: Sellam Ismail <foo_at_siconic.com>
Date: Wed Jul 31 13:57:00 2002

On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Doc Shipley wrote:

> On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Sellam Ismail wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) wrote:
> >
> > > The physical dimensions of the punched cards were chosen to match dollar
> > > bills, so that the processing hardware could make use of existing
> > > subassemblies. I don't know why that particular hole to hole spacing was
> > > chosen, but that combined with the size of the cards resulted in 80
> > > column.
> >
> > Are you sure? A punch card is a bit larger than a dollar bill.
>
> I'm looking at an E-series bill (pre-'60) and although I haven't seen
> a punchcard in a while, I think they're darn close.

Ah, the thought hadn't even crossed my mind that bills have shrunk in size
since the punch card was invented. I'm a product of the 1970s :)

Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org

 * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *
Received on Wed Jul 31 2002 - 13:57:00 BST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:35:03 BST